Sat: Sauber, Marussia, Caterham

Editor

Sauber joined Marussia and Caterham at the bottom of the timesheets in Saturday’s qualifying for the Spanish Grand Prix…

Sauber:
Esteban Gutierrez: “That was the maximum we could achieve today. Considering the difficulties I had yesterday, the team did an excellent job to put things right for today. We definitely still have issues which we have to solve, but being closer to the competition is motivating us. Obviously, we are not completely satisfied with today’s outcome, but with some more work we can find the last tenths to be in the top ten. We need to take out the positive and analyse the negative. For tomorrow it will be a big challenge because the track temperature will probably be quite high, and the tyres are difficult to handle under these conditions. As always, we will do our best.”

Adrian Sutil: “This was obviously not the result I had hoped for. But that’s how it can be in qualifying. Unfortunately, we worked in the wrong direction today. In the third free practice I struggled to get temperature into the tyres, but in qualifying it was exactly the opposite. The tyres overheated significantly. We realised this after the second run and tried to improve it for the final run. We succeeded to a certain extent, but most of the settings were already done and we couldn’t change much. I believe this cost us almost a second per lap and several grid positions. So we missed our goal. Nevertheless, we learned something today, and I am positive we can still achieve something from where I am starting. With a good pace in the race I will be where I should be at the end.”

Marussia:
Max Chilton: “I’m really happy with that. I’m not sure we got the balance exactly where we would have liked it, but in the end my second quick lap was pretty together and it all came good when it counted. That session showed we have made a step forward with our new developments; there’s no doubt that we are closer to the Saubers – and to Q2 contention – and we’ve pulled away from the Caterhams by a good margin. As I say, there was definitely more to come from the car, so I’m pretty optimistic for the race tomorrow. I think we can have a good fight.”

Jules Bianchi: “Such a shame. My second quick lap was really coming together and I had gained a lot of time in the first two sectors, but I braked too late into turn 10 and ran wide. I was just pushing a bit too hard, but we had the car and today we could have been close to a place in Q2, so we had everything to push for. As ever, we have to take the positives and today they are that we have confirmation that we have made a good performance step towards the Saubers and we can really focus on the cars ahead now, not those behind. I have some work to do at the beginning of the race but if I can get a good start I am sure we can pull something special back, so I’m really look forward to tomorrow now.”

Caterham:
Marcus Ericsson: “”For me today’s been both good and bad. I’m pleased I’ve qualified ahead of my teammate for the first time this year, especially because it’s at a track I really like and one everyone knows well, but overall we’re obviously not happy with where we are with performance and we need to improve. In both FP3 and quali I had similar low-grip issues to yesterday and that’s costing a lot of laptime. The car behaviour is unpredictable pretty much the whole way round the track and that makes putting together a clean lap very difficult. However, we have to put this behind us and focus on the race. Overall, we’re starting from the same bit of the grid as we have for most of the season and we have to focus on having a clean race, maintaining the much improved reliability we’ve had since China and grabbing whatever opportunities come our way. I want to leave Spain on a positive note and we’ll all do everything we can to give us the best chance of making that happen.”

Kamui Kobayashi: “Another difficult day with more of the same grip problems I had in both practice sessions yesterday. We made quite a few changes to the car for FP3 but it still didn’t improve things enough, so we went into quali with a package we knew we’d be struggling with. In quali we went for two single lap runs on options and the first was ok, but on my quick lap on the second run I lost a bit of time behind Bianchi and had the same sort of balance problems I’d had in all the practice sessions so I just couldn’t get any more out of the car. Maybe with a completely clean lap I’d have been a couple of tenths up, but not enough to be where we’re aiming for.”

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